Heath care pioneer details vision in talk at Pacific

STOCKTON - University of the Pacific student Keira Domer has known about Victoria Hale since 2000, although she has never met the unassuming pharmaceutical scientist turned global health entrepreneur.

Joe Goldeen

STOCKTON - University of the Pacific student Keira Domer has known about Victoria Hale since 2000, although she has never met the unassuming pharmaceutical scientist turned global health entrepreneur.

"She has always been kind of an intangible mentor to me," said Domer, 34, of Davis, a second-year student at Pacific's Thomas J. Long School of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, who took the opportunity to meet Hale for the first time last week after Hale's inspirational presentation at the university's Global Heroes Lecture Series.

Hale, who previously worked for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in biopharmaceutical drug development and at Genentech - a pioneer in biotechnology - has founded two companies, both nonprofit pharmaceutical manufacturers.

It's a unique business model within one of the world's most profitable industries, but Hale has managed to make it work.

In her first company, One World Health, Hale led the development for a new cure for leishmaniasis - a potentially fatal skin infection caused by parasites found in rain forests and deserts primarily in the Third World. It has afflicted an estimated 12 million people worldwide. In the United States, it has been found in southern Texas. Hale's company also created a new way to treat dehydrating diarrhea and developed a new technology reducing the cost of malaria drugs more than tenfold.

Her latest company, founded in 2009 in San Francisco, is Medicines360, focusing on women's health.

"It's very important to me in this next organization to honor women, to nourish women, to empower women. There just weren't many organizations doing that at the time and one could argue there aren't still enough," Hale told about 150 students and faculty gathered for her presentation co-sponsored by the pharmacy school and Pacific's Global Center for Social Entrepreneurship.

"There are lots of people working in neglected diseases now. Lots of partnerships. I moved to a new model as well. So Medicines360 has been developed to address Millennium Development Goal No. 5," she said, referring to a set of global initiatives adopted by the United Nations Development Program. Goal No. 5 focuses on maternal health. Medicines360's website explains the company's perspective this way:

"Imagine a women's health care company with a revolutionary vision. A company so attuned to addressing the unmet health care needs of women worldwide that it cycles all revenue right back into the company to continue meeting these needs rather than disbursing profits among shareholders."

Hale's initial effort has been working on an affordable, effective and practical contraceptive for women.

For her endeavors, Hale has been elected to membership in the Institute of Medicine of the U.S. National Academies, earned a MacArthur "Genius" Award and received the President's Award of Distinction from the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists.

This week, she also was named the seventh person to receive the Global Heroes Award, the most prestigious recognition offered by Pacific's Global Center for Social Entrepreneurship.

Hanna Sung left Hale's speech inspired. "She's almost like a celebrity pharmacist," said Sung, 22, a first-year pharmacy student from Southern California.

Stockton's Katrina Ordanza, 22, who is pursuing both a doctor of pharmacy degree and a master's in business administration at Pacific, said that she first encountered Hale in 2009, and it changed her life. She recently returned from a Global Center internship in Nairobi, Kenya.

Paraphrasing one of Hale's themes, Ordanza said, "I love to be in the chaos and rise above it, helping communities. I'm excited. To see the bigger picture as she presented it is really, really rewarding."